The Temple Is Equipped for Work

The tabernacle’s altar was five cubits square and three high (Exodus 27:1); this one is sixteen times its surface. Kings mentions the bronze altar (1 Kings 8:64) but gives no account of its making. Ten cubits high, it needed an approach, and Ezekiel’s altar has steps on its east side (Ezekiel 43:17).

Ten cubits across and thirty around gives a ratio of exactly three, the verse often cited in discussions of pi. The line may have been taken below a flared rim, or the figures rounded; the Hebrew reckons in whole cubits throughout.

Where Chronicles has oxen, beqarim, 1 Kings 7:24 has “knops”, peqa’im, gourd-shaped ornaments. The two Hebrew words look alike, and one has probably been read as the other. Either way, the decoration was cast in the same pour as the basin, not added later.

Twelve oxen in threes facing the four directions recall the tribes camped by threes on each side of the tabernacle (Numbers 2). King Ahaz later took the sea down off the oxen and set it on a stone pavement (2 Kings 16:17), probably to send the bronze to Assyria.

A handbreadth is about eight centimetres of cast bronze. The same lily motif crowned the pillars, whose capitals were “lily work” (1 Kings 7:19, 22). When Jerusalem fell, the Babylonians broke the sea in pieces to carry off the metal (2 Kings 25:13).

The tabernacle had a single laver of bronze (Exodus 30:18). First Kings 7:27–39 spends thirteen verses on the ten stands for Solomon’s lavers, with wheels and panels of lions, oxen and cherubim; Chronicles gives them a single line.

Solomon made ten lampstands where the tabernacle had one. After the exile the sanctuary went back to a single lampstand, which Antiochus carried off and Judas Maccabeus replaced (1 Maccabees 1:21; 4:49); the Arch of Titus in Rome shows a single lampstand being carried from Herod’s temple.

First Kings 7:48 names only “the table of gold”, and when Abijah later describes Judah’s worship he speaks of “the pure table” in the singular (13:11). The ten tables here probably served beside one principal table for the shewbread.

The word used here for “court”, azarah, is a late one, found only in Chronicles and Ezekiel. First Kings 6:36 says the inner court was built of three rows of hewn stone and a row of cedar beams, a construction method also used in Solomon’s palace.

“The right side” means the south, as with the pillar Jachin. The sea stood between the altar and the house, in the position of the tabernacle laver, which Exodus 30:18 places “between the tabernacle of the congregation and the altar”.

Pots, shovels and basons were the altar’s working tools, for removing ashes and fat and carrying blood (Exodus 27:3). Where Chronicles reads “pots”, 1 Kings 7:40 has “lavers”, two Hebrew words that look alike in writing.

“Pommels” are gullot, bowl-shaped swellings of the capitals, and “wreaths” are lattices or nets of bronze thrown over them. “To wit” means namely: the verse begins itemising what Huram finished.

Four hundred pomegranates means two hundred per pillar, in two rows of a hundred, the same figure as 1 Kings 7:42. That fits the hundred per row of 3:16, where only one row was counted.

These bases are the wheeled carts of 1 Kings 7:27–37, each carrying a basin of forty baths. Ahaz later cut off their panels and removed the lavers (2 Kings 16:17), and the Babylonians carried away what was left.

“One sea, and twelve oxen” is echoed almost exactly in the list of what Babylon took: “one sea, and twelve brasen bulls” (Jeremiah 52:20). The inventory of making and the inventory of plunder use the same words.

Huram is called “his father”, the title Huram-abi of 2:13, used as Joseph said God had made him “a father to Pharaoh” (Genesis 45:8), meaning an honoured adviser. “Bright brass” is polished or burnished bronze.

Succoth lay east of the Jordan, where Jacob built booths for his cattle (Genesis 33:17). “Clay ground” is literally “the thickness of the ground”, dense clay suited for casting moulds. First Kings 7:46 names Zarethan, the town near which the Jordan heaped up for Joshua’s crossing (Joshua 3:16).

“Could not be found out” is literally could not be searched out. The phrase recalls David’s bronze “without weight” in 1 Chronicles 22:3 and 14, which suggests the father’s stockpile went into the son’s castings.

The golden altar is the altar of incense, which stood in the main hall before the inner room, as the tabernacle’s gold-covered altar had stood before the veil (Exodus 30:1–6). “Tables” is plural again, as in verse 8.

The ten lampstands stood “before the oracle”, in the main hall facing the inner room, five on each side. The law had required lamps to burn from evening until morning, tended by the priests (Leviticus 24:2–4).

The flowers are the blossoms worked on the lampstands, modelled on almond flowers (Exodus 25:33). The tongs are the kind a seraph used to lift a live coal from the altar in Isaiah 6:6. “Perfect gold” is literally “the perfection of gold”, the purest grade.

“Snuffers” are wick trimmers, from the verb for pruning, the same root as Isaiah’s “pruninghooks” (Isaiah 2:4). The gold on the doors would not stay: Hezekiah stripped it off to pay the king of Assyria (2 Kings 18:16).